Call of Chicago: Bug Hunters

Bugs! Everywhere you look there’s another kind of bug
Makes you want to get a club and clout ’em
Yes everybody’s talking bout the worrysome bugs
But ain’t nobody doing nothing about ’em …

Bugs! Everywhere you look there’s another type of bug
But if ya live in the delta ya got ’em …
— Bobbie Gentry, “Bugs” (1967)

In 1951, the sudden onslaught of the Korean War drove a somewhat less-sudden onslaught of Federal preparedness programs: civil defense, counter-intelligence, and — as it happened — bacteriological warfare defense. Thrust onto the front lines of this effort, Alexander Langmuir, M.D. (b. 1910), the Director of the Epidemiology Program Office of the CDC, proposed the creation of a special unit of “shoe leather epidemiologists” to investigate suspicious clusters. Langmuir believed in national surveillance as the key to detecting outbreaks and determining hidden patterns and vectors, but without intelligent observers on the ground, analysis was worthless.

Do not lose the briefcase. Do NOT lose the briefcase. DO NOT LOSE THE BRIEFCASE.

The resulting Epidemic Intelligence Service (EIS) started up in 1953, with a “class” of 22 doctors and veterinarians. Langmuir runs the EIS out of his hip pocket, and after exposing a faulty polio vaccine in 1955 he begins salting other offices of the CDC with EIS alumni. EIS officers discover links between cancer and birth defects in Niles, Illinois; clamp down on the Hong Kong flu epidemic in 1968 (which nonetheless kills 100,000 Americans over the next three years); and discover norovirus in Norwalk, Ohio in 1969. By the 1960s, the EIS has around 40 members, all post-graduate medical professionals: doctors, veterinarians, nurses, microbiologists, and the inevitable-for-the-decade statisticians. The numbers go up in 1966, when the EIS becomes a recognized alternative to the draft; the doctors nickname themselves the “Yellow Berets.” But EIS officers still get sent to remote lands: not just hurricane-devastated stretches of Mississippi or dengue-ridden fields in Puerto Rico, but to Jamaica (for diptheria vaccination), rebellious Biafra in West Africa (for smallpox eradication efforts), and the remote back-country of Bolivia.

In that last operation, the U.S. Army Medical Unit (USAMU, which becomes USAMRIID in 1969) tasks the CDC to bring back samples of the bubonic plague from an outbreak in July of 1964. The EIS sends a team under a CDC plague specialist to the village of Descargadero, where a quarter of the local Quechua population had died of the plague. They dig up the most recent plague victim, sever her pinkie finger (plague viruses survive longest in bone marrow), pack it in dry ice and bring it back to Fort Detrick, Maryland.

“It’s an awful thought—whole forgotten cycles of evolution with beings and races and wisdom and diseases—all lived through and gone before the first amoeba ever stirred in the tropic seas geology tells us about.”

— H.P. Lovecraft and Adolphe de Castro, “The Last Test”

Grave-robbing and plague-collecting seem to lead us ineluctably to the DELTA GREEN side of all this. You can simply have an EIS Officer as part of the standard Agent team; whether Langmuir is cleared or just knows to look the other way is the Handler’s call. Or Langmuir could be MAJESTIC, possibly MJ-8 connected. (Or both! His CDC tenure goes back to before the formal DELTA GREEN-MAJESTIC split.) He might simply be legitimately, rationally terrified of alien viruses — but since the EIS also practices live trials of both vaccines and strains of disease on Federal prisoners, he might just be another mad scientist with a slightly better rep.

Or you could play an all-EIS (or mostly-EIS with one USAMU liaison to shoot people) team, mostly fighting legitimate diseases in a legitimate way, with new pneumatic Ped-o-Jet injectors and clever grid maps of infection punched into computer-readable cards. And every so often, yes, fighting ghouls. Run each containment effort as a chase, using the average of the team’s First Aid as their chase pool and varying the Disease pool to reflect its virulence and lethality. Rather than the Fall of DELTA GREEN best-of-three chases, use the full thriller chase mechanics from Night’s Black Agents (NBA, p. 53), rolling one contest per scene (or per day). Each point of Lead the disease opens up kills 10 (or 1, or 100, or whatever) people; at Lead 10 it becomes a full-blown outbreak. The scenes themselves become interpersonal interactions with possible victims, and searches for vectors: Are these canned tuna full of botulism? Did these farmers eat crops tainted by fungicide? Is the disease spreading from UFO contactees? If the Handler has determined a vector, the Agents figuring it out can count as a Swerve on their part, or just affect that scene’s contest like a standard Investigative spend. Alien or sentient diseases, or those spread by villains, can Raise and Swerve or even attack the Agents!

Epidemic Intelligence Service Officer

Start with Physician (FoDG, p. 043) or the basic Medic template (if your Agent has military training; FoDG, p. 026) and layer on CDC Researcher (FoDG, p. 034). Add Traffic Analysis 1. For a veterinarian or microbiologist (or other medical specialist), spend 2 build points on Special Training (FoDG, p. 072) in that specialty, which adds +2 to your First Aid tests to save a subject’s life, or to the Health test of a subject under your care (resisting toxins, for example) within that specialty. It doesn’t increase the amount of First Aid points you have to spend refreshing the subject’s Health.

Army Medical Unit Field Investigator

Well, you say you’re with the AMU. You might be with the Biological Warfare Laboratory, also at Fort Detrick, which doesn’t shut down until 1969. Build an active-duty Army Medic (FoDG, p. 026). Add Agency (AMU) 1, increase Medicine to 3.

Add one of: HUMINT 1, Photography 1, Reassurance 1

Add one of: Athletics 3, Firearms 3, Health 3

CIA Project CHICKWIT Liaison

Hey, if you’re going into the Lake Mlolo area anyway, maybe someone from Langley could tag along. No reason, just more of a backstop for you, really. Also, don’t pay any mind if he puts any unusual biological samples — yellow lotus, or Glossina diabolis flies, or what-have-you — into this sealed container.

Every dangerous biological investigation operation needs a Paul Reiser type, and the Agency has lots of them to spare.

Build a Political Action Division Officer (FoDG, p. 043), with the following exchanges: Biology 2 instead of the Art and History abilities; Negotiation instead of Inspiration.


The Fall of DELTA GREEN adapts DELTA GREEN: THE ROLE-PLAYING GAME to the GUMSHOE investigative roleplaying system, opening the files on a lost decade of anti-Mythos operations: the 1960s. Players take on the role of DELTA GREEN operatives, assets, and friendlies. Hunt Deep Ones beneath the Atlantic, shut down dangerous artists in San Francisco, and delve into the heart of Vietnam’s darkness. Purchase The Fall of DELTA GREEN in print and PDF at the Pelgrane Shop.

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